More Thoughts on--“Is All Music Created Equal?”—part 2

More Thoughts on--“Is All Music Created Equal?”—part 2

The Yale Seminar; the Julliard Repertory Project; and the Tanglewood Symposium were 20^th century attempts to improve the quality of music studied.  All of these had a positive influence on the quality of music used in schools in the 20^th century. However, the strong emphasis on studying pop music almost exclusively in some schools caused the quality of school music to decline in the last years of the 20th and now in the 21^st century. 

The inclusion of world music by some schools has broadened music education by making students aware of other music traditions.  However, the study of other musics should not become a platform for Post-modernistic pluralism.  Hodges stated, “Contrarily, one of the difficulties with this position [postmodernism] is that if everything has value, nothing has value, a position which taken in the extreme leads to nihilism.” Donald Hodges, A Concise Survey of Music Philosophy by Donald Hodges, pp 228-29.  Nihilism is “the belief that traditional morals, ideas, beliefs, etc., have no worth or value.”  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nihilism The emphasis of the use of examples of world music should be on awareness rather than to foster pluralism in Western music philosophy or to try to follow post-modernism’s nihilistic agenda of the denial of core values in Western music.

Scripture for the Day

Luke 21:33, “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.”